Charlie Chaplin's Last Home in Geneva to Become a Museum

Charlie Chaplin's last home in Switzerland will be turned into a permanent place of pilgrimage for fans of the actor who immortalized the "Little Tramp," one of his sons said Monday.

The mansion at Corsier-sur-Vevey by the shores of Lake Geneva was chosen over Los Angeles and London as the site of the first museum dedicated to the screen legend, said Michael Chaplin.

The museum has been a decade in the planning and will be finished within two years, he said. It will feature objects from Chaplin's life and displays chronicling his rise from the music halls of his native London to stardom in Hollywood's silent movie era and beyond.

"He was very happy here because he had a family life," Michael Chaplin said of the vintner's chateau where his father lived for more than 20 years and raised eight children until his death in 1977.

The actor whose film classics include "The Immigrant," ''City Lights" and "The Great Dictator," was barred from the United Stated in 1952 during the peak of McCarthyism over suspicions he harbored communist sympathies. He returned briefly two decades later to receive an honorary Academy Award for his life work...